If you have a silo approach in your organization that "we'll implement all the features then throw these deliverables over the fence to Testers and then get on with the next set of features, this is a recipe for much more time and effort 10x for your organization". The number of outstanding bugs will grow and the backlog will become a challenge. It becomes an ongoing increasing debt. Customer and End-User frustration is inevitable and worst case you actually start the process of net effect losing customers.

At Microsoft, we embrace the notion that it's easier to fix a bug further upstream than it is downstream. We prefer to eliminate bugs as you write code, and if those bugs creep out, we like to empower our testers to find those bugs quickly and provide rich diagnostics such as IntelliTrace, VM snapshots, Video, System Information and other such information with minimum effort, so that the Developer is able to immediately act upon fixing the bug and closing it - successfully reproducing that bug and being taken immediately to the line code or data or environment that caused it. The Tester must be able to find bugs ongoing, quickly, communicate this - in seconds and move and find as many as possible before your customer does.

That's why, we believe Developers and Testers, and yet also Project Managers, Operations and other team members must be a part of an ongoing continuous quality cycle. To that end, there is no solution quite as integrated and out of the box (not an army on consultants from the vendor), that provide the solution for modern application development with quality baked in from the onset.

          
Here are some videos to get you started.

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonsingh/archive/2014/02/21/short-videos-about-visual-studio-and-team-foundation-server.aspx
(see Testers section)

https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Test-Plans-That-Reduce-Risk

https://channel9.msdn.com/events/Visual-Studio/Launch-2013/QE102

           
Browser Based Client

https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Test-Case-Management-with-Visual-Studio-Online/Managing-test-steps-and-test-data-with-Test-Hub-on-Visual-Studio-Online

https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Test-Case-Management-with-Visual-Studio-Online/Test-Planning-with-Test-Hub-on-Visual-Studio-Online

https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Test-Case-Management-with-Visual-Studio-Online/Creating-test-cases-with-Test-Hub-on-Visual-Studio-Online

https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Test-Case-Management-with-Visual-Studio-Online/Running-tests-and-filing-bugs-with-Test-Hub-on-Visual-Studio-Online

Documentation.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj635157.aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182409.aspx

Blogs.
Hit Test.

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/

Some
Training. This alludes to Automated Testing and Working with Azure for Testing.

https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/software-testing-fundamentals

https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/dev-test-scenarios-in-the-devops-world

https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/software-testing-with-visual-studio-2012-exam-70-497-jump-start

https://codesssvhackathon.challengepost.com/

We have similar event taking place at same day in London in case you're based near there.

https://codesshackathonlondon.challengepost.com/

https://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/Session/2014/azure-development-with-the-visual-studio-tools

For more details on the event please refer to the following links,

https://twitter.com/sv_code_camp

and

https://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/

Answer: These can be determined based on configuration, managing, testing, workflows and network For Lab Management, the user entry point is Microsoft Test Manager(MTM), where they will be able to manage their environments (create, delete, take snapshot, restore snapshot etc.). While Lab user is performing some operation on his environment and the corresponding error message is shown in MTM, on the right side section of environment and upon clicking the view detail you can see exact error message.  Suppose  you have to check SCVMM errors for further debugging you can do this by checking job history for that VM(Name of the VM in SCVMM admin console can be found by doing right click and selecting “System Information” refer screenshots directly below) in SCVMM admin console Jobs tab.
For more information please see the following link (note it’s dated back to 2009, but still applicable). Troubleshooting errors in lab management

Question 2: How do we run Lab Management across network domains? For example, a company has domains for Production, Users, and a Lab domain for the Build and Test controllers along with Lab Management.  These domains have no trust relationship. The scenario is a user needs to access all of these.

Answer: For domains, we can define a topology that can be one-way or two-way or no-trust. For more information please see the following link where multiple sample network topologies are discussed.

Team Foundation Server Architecture

Planning Your Lab and

Setting up various topologies to test with Visual Studio Lab Management

Question 3: How  do we see how users are using Lab Management and the associated creation and consumption of virtual machine resources? For example, a customer needs to determine the state of these machines as well as administer aspects of the Lab Management environment based on observations.

Answer: We can develop custom reports which enable us to create any kind of view we require. The APIs are well documented and can be found at the following links. Note, only the first three links will help create reports.

Querying Lab Environments Using TFS Lab Management APIs

How to find all the automated test runs that happened on a lab environment?

How to find whether lab environment is in healthy state or not?

Create Lab Environment using TFS Lab Management APIs

How to compose a lab environment from existing SCVMM based machines?

How to cancel an ongoing operation on lab environment programmatically?

How to list down all the “importable” virtual machines/templates programmatically?

Question 4: How do we see the owner of an environment in Lab Management via SCVMM?

Answer: Here is a screenshot depicting the owner in SCVMM.

Question 5: Can you provide guidelines for configuring Lab Management?

Answer: This well documented at the following location.

Configuring Lab Management for SCVMM Environments

Lab Management Guide from the ALM Rangers

Question 6:  What is recommended as a connection point between SCVMM, the VM templates, VM machine instances and snapshots? Can these storage partitions be achieved on separate SANs via an infini-band connection and what is the sharing protocol? Or is it recommended that we put all these pieces together in a manner that is highly performant.

Answer: System Center provides in depth guidance on optimal hardware configurations. There is some introductory guidance with the following link.

 Optimized virtual machine deployments from the VMM library using ODX

Rights Management for Lab Management and SCVMM

1. For the combination of a TFS instance and a SCVMM farm, one service account should be used by TFS to access the SCVMM farm.
2. TFS provides the ability to provide granular rights to users and that should be used to limit the rights of the user. This can be achieved as described in the following links.

ManagingUser Permissions for Lab Management and

TFSLabConfig Permissions Command.

     3. For ensuring that one team does not hog the resources in LM, the quota allocation can be done at Host Group/ Library share level per project. This can be done by adding respective groups to team project at the time of Lab Management configuration. See the section titled - Configure Lab Management for Each Team Project Collection. Please see the following link.

    Configuring Lab Management for SCVMM Environments

      The lowest granular level is to assign a host group to each team project and limit the number of resources that they can use. This way overuse of resources by one team will not affect others.

    4. Created By: LM records who creates environments by setting the owner field and this is also recorded in the SC in the description field.

Additional Links

VS ALM Lab management Frequently Asked Questions

Lab Management Blog from Subramanyam [MSFT]

Lab Management Blog - Aseem Bansal [MSFT]

Lab Management Blog - Muthukumaran [MSFT]

Wednesday, June 25, 2014: Jason Singh,                                         Azure Overview for Development Teams

Jason Singh has over 25 years’ experience in the software industry. He has worked as a Software Developer shipping products worldwide from Altera, Informix, Sybase and Microsoft. He now focuses on showing the value of Visual Studio to his customers. In his spare time, he enjoys photography, aquariums, reading and spending time with his wife and sons Samuel and Oliver.

Azure is the big buzzword from Microsoft. Come and learn what you have available to you with your MSDN account. Lots of capability to help you get your work done as a Developer, Tester or anyone within the Development organization.

We shall look at the perspective of interacting with Azure services via Visual Studio and also the newly announced Visual Studio Online features.

Tek Systems

DynamSoft-SacdotNet uses SourceAnywhere remote source control solution,    sponsored by         Dynamsoft.     
   
   
Discount ASP.NET-SacDotNet webhosting is sponsored by         Discount ASP.NET

      This week we have announced REST APIs and Service Hooks in Visual Studio Online (VSO) as a preview mode.

      What does this mean? It means we can open up wider integration with 3rd party applications and services. I've had a few customers express the lack of integration and we're delighted that over the next few months, we can expect to see much greater integration.

      For example, VSO is now integrated with HipChat, Jenkins, Github to name a few.

      Here's a link to the Preview of the REST API. https://www.visualstudio.com/integrate/reference/reference-vso-overview-vsi

      And the announcement from Brian Harry's blog. https://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2014/05/12/a-new-api-for-visual-studio-online.aspx

      We live in exciting times!

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee620640(v=vs.120).aspx

As an example, let's say we wanted to get this kind of data in the following form into Excel.

We can use the following SQL statement.

Use Tfs_Warehouse

Go

Select IterationPath, StartDate, FinishDate from DimIteration order by StartDate, IterationPath

This yields as follows:

If we were to create new iterations, we can process the Warehouse immediately through a web service. Select ProcessWarehouse link from the following URL.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff400237.aspx

This provides the following screen.

Finally, use the following link to use the query to populate an Excel spreadsheet.

https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/use-microsoft-query-to-retrieve-external-data-HA010099664.aspx

https://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/mvc-5/introduction/getting-started

Topics are grouped by roles. Enjoy!

Project Management

* Agile Planning with Team Foundation Server 2013

Managing Work Items using Kanban

Team Foundation Server

Introducing Team Room, A New Collaboration Feature in Team Foundation Server

** Agile Software Development with Microsoft Visual Studio ALM

Architects

Improving architecture through modeling

Using layer diagrams to design and validate your architecture

Developers

Using Code Review to Improve Quality

Visual Studio: Manual Test To Coded UI Test

Easily testing user interfaces with Coded UI tests

Improving quality with unit tests and fakes

Visual Studio 2013 Web Editor Features - Page Inspector

Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2013

Visual Studio 2013 Web Editor Features - HTML5

Parallels: Using Visual Studio on OSX

Introducing SQL Server Database Projects Tooling in Visual Studio 2013

Lap Around Visual Studio Online “Monaco”

​Introducing the Visual Studio 2013 Virtual Machine on Windows Azure

* Debugging Applications and Analyzing Usage with Visual Studio 2013

* What’s new for ALM in Visual Studio 2013 and Team Foundation Server 2013

​What's New for C++ Developers in Visual Studio 2013 IDE

​Introducing TypeScript

Understanding Your Code Using Code Map

​Introducing ASP.NET SignalR 2

* Introducing ASP.NET MVC 5

​Improved Developer Productivity Using CodeLens

Testers

Load testing applications in Visual Studio

Introducing the Unit Test Generator for Visual Studio

New testing tools for manual testers

Improve unit testing workflow with these Test Explorer improvements

Operations

Capturing & Analyzing Performance Events Using IntelliTrace Performance Indicators
and System Center 2012 R2

Introducing Application Insights

Azure

Intro to Windows Azure with Scott Hanselman

​New Windows Azure Benefits for MSDN Subscribers!

Introducing SQL Azure

Seeing is believing, so here is the demo.

https://1drv.ms/MIK1nR 

Many version control systems are unable to perform this kind of operation hard work. With TFS, this comes for free if you have a MSDN subscription to Visual Studio.